I’m laughing at myself. My family are pretty much on the floor in laughter.
See, this girl announced in her teens that she would one day have a house with a small courtyard garden to grow herbs, a few smelly flowers, and space for a BBQ. That was it. She would then frequent her local supermarket and enjoy buying someone else’s hard work.
So could someone please explain how in 10 years I am:
- Planting fruit trees
- Learning all about seeds
- Teaching myself to build raised borders
- Crazily, really crazily, reading up about keeping chickens and goats…
- Discovering the world of homemade cleaners
- Oh, and considering buying myself a pressure canner so I can ‘can’ whatever I want.
Like, what?! Seriously?! What happened in those ten years??!!?!?!
I think I can blame Joel for some of it. His dreams of having chickens must have entered my subconscious somewhere and started chipping away. Then we had Georgie and suddenly chemicals and the planet became more important. I realised I had a responsibility to our health and this planet.
Enter us buying this beautiful house (ok, the house isn’t great but the garden and views are!) and a ready-made vegetable garden that was just asking me to plant something in it. So I did plant something and, to my utter shock, it grew. We ate potatoes we’d grown ourselves and salads from our own garden and broad beans…oh man, home grown broad beans…
The main problem with this late burst of enthusiasm for a more self-sufficient lifestyle is I spent all of my childhood under my dad (a plant biochemist and amazing gardener) deliberately not asking any questions or wanting anything to do with it. If you mentioned the word ‘gardening’, I’d volunteer myself into pretty much any other household chore to get out of it! And the other problem is I married a boy who grew up in an urban setting.
I’m not pretending this blog is going to become anyone’s ‘encyclopaedia’ and definitely don’t come to us for advice! But it might cause some amusement (if only for my family who, I swear, will probably never stop laughing) and, who knows, maybe we’ll find some other people along the way that are also hunting down a way to be wiser stewards of this planet and their own bodies. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll make so many mistakes and write about them and someone else won’t have to make them then. Maybe.
Anyway, you’re welcome to join us for the ride. The one where I learn to use a drill, plant seedlings that don’t die, debate endlessly the wisdom or crazy foolishness of getting goats, and all that sort of fun.
We aren’t going self-sufficient. We love our Wi-fi, running water and the joys of Tesco yellow-stickers too much to go entirely off-grid. What we want to find out is whether there’s a slower, more meaningful pace of life in this, that will enable us to raise our family to be wise stewards of God’s planet.
a short-haired hippy 
In this day, growing what you can is a wonderful step, and certainly don’t fell guilty about not going “off grid.” Every less item going to a landfill, every less foot of plastic wrap used, every gallon of fuel not transporting food, etc. make a difference if millions of people do it!
That’s a great encouragement, thank you! We’ve been challenged to try and source more of our food locally (and it can’t get more local than 2 metres outside your front door!). We were thinking more of the food miles cost – I hadn’t thought of the plastic wrap but you’re right! Particularly going into summer where everything salad wise seems to have a plastic covering, we should make quite a dent in our ‘plastic consumption’ by simply picking lettuce from our garden!